I’d been using Ilford DDX, which is a very nice developer, but I tried Ilford Perceptol, and found it more difficult to get good results, but that was partly because some of my winter scenes were a little too bright. The problem was compounded by the fact that I started to experiment with some other developing chemicals, and I guess I learned that you don’t experiment when shooting film on important shoots. As one of my incredibly knowledgable participants on my January Hokkaido Landscape Tour shared with me though, for film, you have to protect the shadows rather than the highlights, and therefore I find that I’m not exposing the same way with film and that is more important with snow scenes, because of all the white, although in general, my exposures were just about spot on. What happened was a combination of various factors that actually did make my images too grainy, so I’ll briefly cover that too.īasically, for some of my winter snow scenes, I was essentially over-exposing my images a little, because with digital I get better quality images by exposing to the right. I initially was not happy with the results I was getting from SilverFast 8 as I thought it was too grainy, but I’ve been able to get over that to a degree. we’re talking a couple of bucks per photo, so it keeps you relatively careful about releasing the shutter each time, although I will, of course, still opt to grab a photo and throw it out if necessary, rather than hesitating too much about the cost.Īlthough I’ve been using SilverFast 8 to scan my film for the last six months, I realized last week that I had not talked about it here on the blog and podcast, so I’d like to do that today. As I shared last week, one roll gives me just 12 frames, and with developing costs etc. After a fair amount of research I decided to go for the CanoScan 9000F Mark II scanner, the main reasons for which are the ability to get very high resolution scans of my 6 x 6 cm medium format negatives on 120 film. The Rollei and Lab-Box have brought it all back around for me, so I will occasionally shoot film for the pure joy of it, and being able to come home and process my film myself is the icing on the cake.īack in episode 690 I also talked about the scanner that I bought late last year because my old Epson scanner had given up the ghost. The Rollei was a replacement for my old Yashica TLR camera, which I still have, but the few drawbacks in its design and the difficulty and sometimes pure panic of working with the dark bags that I reported on around four years ago, had caused my interest in film to dwindle again for a while. In total, there are 5 individual videos, each one has been compiled in to the mp4 format making them compatible on most devices which supports either the Windows or Mac operating systems. Also included is a step wedge which can be used in photoshop to evaluate your image for tonal placements within the zone system.About six months ago I posted about my Rolleiflex F3.5 Twin Lens Reflex camera, and how the ability to develop film in broad daylight with the Lab-Box had contributed to a rekindling of my love for film. SilverFast Black and White Scanning Mini Video Tutorials After extensively trying a wide range of other software, I have eventually settled with Silverfast AI Studio by Lasersoft. Although the software supplied with the scanner, Epson Scan will produce a digital file from the negative, I was never really happy with the results. My personal method is to use a flat bed scanner, in my case this is an Epson V800. There are many ways in which we can do this conversion, from actually photographing the negative with a digital camera using a macro lens all the way through to performing high quality drum scans. One main challenge I have found, is getting a chemically developed negative into the digital world without losing the tonal rang. I shall be writing a blog post on my personal website in the near future about this but in the meantime, what I can say, is that analog film photography is a completely different experience. I have been using digital cameras for many years but my personal involvement with film is relatively new. In this digital age, you would think the number of people using traditional film cameras would be small but you may be surprised to hear that sales of used film cameras and accessories are steadily on the increase. I use a simple but effective black and white scanning workflow which produce good quality images for print. The SilverFast Black and White Scanning WorkflowĪfter spending many hours learning how to get the most from the analog to digital conversion form the equipment I have, I thought it would be a good idea to share this information via a mini video series.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |